O/T - Forbes 400 Just In.

[OuchThatHurts]

Bill Gates and others are worth that on paper. That's much different than having 53 bil under your mattress. That money is invested in shares of other companies and entities and real estate where people live. It's not as if he could just yank the money out of a bank account. He'd be pulling money out of companies that without that money would be under-capitalized and possibly collapse completely. Let's say I own a string of properties (cough) and have capitalized a large portion of a few different corporate entities. Yes, on paper, that wealth would be attached to my name but then I'd have to liquidate it all into actual cash, which would then have to be "liquidated" into some type of commodity. Unless you have complete faith in the dollar bill. It would all mean possibly putting a fair share of peeps out of work and a few families looking for new places to live.

I wonder how much on-hand cash some of these people (billionaires) have? I'm sure it's a lot but it is still all accounted for by the IRS so they get paid from salaries, bonuses, profit from securities sold, leases and rents, etc. Throw all this together and you have their net income. I'd be curious to know what that might be (actual income).

Anyway, just think about how little being a millionaire means today? That just means you have a decent job, you own your homes and cars, have a retirement fund and a few investments and wallah! You're a millionaire. Probably more than a millionaire. I really don't start to think of real wealth until I see more up into 50-100 million dollars. Everyday americans are millionaires today.

Compare all that to someone who has a $250,000/yr income. He has a mortgage on a $600k home and two car payments on vehicles worth over $100k combined. Let's add a kid or two going through college. Seriously, this guy could be literally three quarters of a million IN DEBT! Even with that $250k a year income which I believe is well above the national average for household incomes.

So spend wisely and don't rent, lease, borrow what you can't afford. Live within your means and pay for what you own. Yes... BUY the car. Don't finance it. If you're going to finance anything, make sure it's something that will APPRECIATE like real estate or a solid company with good fundamentals. Many say there's a reason why the poor are poor. Well that's partly true but with a little smarts, you can really keep yourself in the green (or some say black). In other words, you want others to owe you, not for you to owe everyone else.

I don't know. Just some thoughts here on a friday night but I'm off to a late dinner. Take care peoples!

 

[Kaiser]

Some good words as always OTH. As a side note I believe the last time I read Bill was still under 1 million in salary a year.

 

[BigBoyJ]

Some good words as always OTH. As a side note I believe the last time I read Bill was still under 1 million in salary a year.

Yeah, but he makes a few million per day in interest.

Anyway, y'all are making my brain hurt. Too much reading. I think the only sensible thing to do is for all 400 billionaires to each donate 1 million dollars to me. I'm not greedy. 400 million dollars would be fine for me. I don't need to be a billionaire. And I won't need prostitutes, I could just pay college girls. They wouldn't be prostitutes, well, at least not til I paid them. Mmmm college girls.

 

[Kaiser]

Yeah, but he makes a few million per day in interest.

Anyway, y'all are making my brain hurt. Too much reading. I think the only sensible thing to do is for all 400 billionaires to each donate 1 million dollars to me. I'm not greedy. 400 million dollars would be fine for me. I don't need to be a billionaire. And I won't need prostitutes, I could just pay college girls. They wouldn't be prostitutes, well, at least not til I paid them. Mmmm college girls.

Yeah, see what you caused... lol

 

[n4dmoney]

Also, what a lot of people don't realize is that people that own businesses and know how to take advantage of it actually have very few personal expenses. Therefore if you are a W2 person making $100k per year vs being a business owner making $100k on his W2 it is very different.

Because a business owner runs his cars, gas, insurance, meals (many of them), hotel stays, cell phone, home office, home Internet, and many other personal expenses that can be legitimately turned into business expenses can use that W2 $100k to go a lot further than the standard W2er making $100k.

So you can imagine what these big shots get that they don't personally pay for:
Cars, Planes, Yachts, and on and on and on........thing of beauty!!!!!

 

[OuchThatHurts]

Thanks Har. Good thread! Less than a million a year huh? Who could live on less than a million a year?? They have to start paying these execs more. LOL

BBJ... You know your original idea is pretty astute. Many people and nations throughout history thought that same idea. It seems like it should work huh? Even in the early Christian church the wealth of all the church members was added and divided according to need. It's a very novel idea indeed. We call this way of life communism. Ideally, everyone does the same amount of work, for the same amount of pay, eats the same amount of food, and wears the same clothing and everything works out all fine and dandy.

Unfortunately for communism, the idea never works for very long. People lose incentive to work harder and better themselves and these lazy buggers drop the ball and everyone else ends up carrying their workload. Pretty soon you have 10 guys, all getting the same wage and only one is doing any work because that one guy believes in communism dammit. The good of the people! But soon even he will look around and ask himself why he's sweating when he could get paid to stand around with his hands in his pockets. Eventually nothing gets done. The former Soviet Union is a prime example of communism gone awry. That's why it's so important to slam, repeatedly, the idea of communism into peoples' heads. They do this by not allowing anything that could possibly be contrary to the "common good". This means people have very little freedoms (religion, press, etc.). Individuality is discouraged. Even blue jeans were contraband. Everyone is kept VERY “common”. How do people respond to repression? It’s kind of like the saying about a fistful of sand – the more you tighten your hand around the sand, the more it slips through the cracks in your fingers. Same thing happens to people when you squeeze them.

I think back to the days of Tiananmen Square in the late 80s. A group of kids (several thousand) was point blank gunned down in the street. Just massacred in a sacred place built some 600 years ago. Some of you guys may not be old enough to remember that day. This happened because they were promoting democracy and since democracy threatened the social structure (the “social order”), thousands were eliminated with extreme prejudice. As tragic as it was, what really died that day in the square was communism itself. Just rambling on again. T’care!